Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [101]
By the afternoon of the fourth day, Garth and I were finally prepared to stop the reaping of the aesthetic but useless flowers and begin sowing the vegetables and fruits we could live on. When Mrs. Karvel came by with our daily rations (Stove Top stuffing mix, Sylvia’s canned collard greens, and Spam) Garth made a point to show her our progress before she scuttled away as usual, making the request for the seeds we would need for the next stage in our victory garden. Mrs. Karvel seemed perpetually stressed, rarely out of motion any time I saw her. Standing still for a moment, without food or an emptied plate or a feather duster in hand, seemed almost a painful act for her.
“You gonna have to make that patch bigger, ain’t you?” she said, looking out at the rows of rich, dark earth we had uncovered. This comment came to me as a surprise, because I thought if anything we’d perhaps been overzealous.
“You want it bigger?” I muttered aloud, more out of shock than as an actual question.
“Honey, we ain’t got enough food to feed you. A few months, tops, but it ain’t like the cans in storage are breeding new ones,” she told us, leaning forward and dropping her voice as if her husband might hear us, as far away as he was. “This is the deal. Either you guys got to figure out a way to grow us all some new food or you tell me how the hell we can get out of this goddamn fish-bowl.”
* The culinary term “Welsh rabbit,” is of course a joke. A very old one as jokes go, dating back to the early eighteenth century. The joke, English in origin, was that the Welsh were either too poor or too stupid or too generally pathetic to have actual meat on their plates, so cheese grilled on toast was their delusional equivalent. The other version of this title, “Welsh rarebit,” is in fact a degradation of the original, a mishearing that was later adopted as a less offensive alternative. To little avail. In fact, the English so derided their neighbors to the west of the isle that in their language the very word Welsh became synonymous with substandard or imitation goods.
† I often forget that to some I actually look “black,” not just ethnically but along the “one drop” line. I become comfortable in one category in the world’s eyes and then am surprised by the next person’s interpretation when it’s altogether different. The difficulty lies not in the categories of looking “white” or “black” but in the inability to simply choose one self-image to rest in, never knowing how the next person will view or interact with me. In that sense, Mrs. Karvel’s discomfort with my presence as a Negro was more comforting to me than the trepidation I often feel not knowing how I will be perceived.
‡ Mostly at the zoo. And the mall.
§ Or possibly rising, I was never quite sure.
IN the two weeks it took to clear and sow a patch of land big enough for a suitable amount of vegetables to be grown, my head was in my job. My heart, though, was still in the frozen hell along with Angela. It hurt, and when it didn’t that was only because it had frozen numb. I thought of her, and of them, often. But not too often. I couldn’t call, I couldn’t write, and I had no real power to change this situation. So I made myself busy in work instead. And as I labored, I learned the truth behind the mysteries of this new world where I found myself. I discovered the smell of lavender was not coming from the flowers of the same name: it was pumped out from the air ducts that lined the far walls and appeared in the bushes, through vents disguised in concrete made to look like igneous rock formations. After a while, I didn’t take notice of it, except